The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

by Andrew Sean Greer

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  “Not this time, bubs,” he said, blushing deeply. “It’s not a party for married ladies.” I could tell at once it was a lie.

  I laughed. “I can do as I like.”

  That surprised him. He had removed the rose from his buttonhole and was pulling it apart with his fingers, letting the petals fall into a bowl. My comment made him stop. “I know this sounds crazy coming from me, after how I’ve acted these last years,” he said, laughing, then becoming sober. He stroked his chin. I could see him deciding on his words. And then he said something really remarkable: “But I want you to think about our family reputation. I’m marrying a senator’s daughter in two months. They care about these things.”

  I asked him what he was talking about.

  “These people here are full of ideas,” he said meaningfully. “Free love. Other things. Don’t fall for it, trust me. For my sake, Greta.”

  A shift in weather, and we are a different person. The split of an atom, and we change. Why would I expect my brother to be the same one I’d known? Free spirited, bold, selfish, foolish, drinking and smoking and laughing too much with his gap teeth wide in his face? It takes so little to make us different people. Who knows what this Felix had lived through? What cloudy day, or snowfall, or shifted atom made him into this Babbitty little prude? Engaged to a senator’s daughter, talking about reputations, my brother who once had sequined gowns hanging in his closet? And was it now impossible to change him? Or was it as simple as another atom turning, this way toward me?

  “You’ve lost your mind,” I said, then added boldly: “You’re headed to a sex party right now.”

  He flushed again, this time in anger. “I’m going to a very high-level political event. It’s full of very high-level men.”

  I laughed at that, and he grimaced at me and without another word he was gone. Was he lying to himself, or just to me?

  I stayed at the party for much longer than I expected—mostly because newcomers had completely blocked the exit—and finally succumbed to the drunken revelry by taking a few sips of the “Versailles punch” my aunt was now passing around, a hideously sweet drink made from French champagne, English gin, American lemons, and German honey liquor. More than a little of it went onto the Persian rug, and I supposed the maid would not get Armistice Day off tomorrow. I spent a good hour chatting with a handsome bearded schoolteacher, in a trim blue suit, who talked about the need for national health care. The piano was still going—this time with a girl singing a love song unknown to me—and the booze left me smiling and twinkling at everyone. I looked at the clock on the mantel.

  “Ruth,” I said, pushing my way toward her. There was now a very familiar smell that I associated with my own era, and I noticed the bartender with a girl in a long green dress, embroidered with daisies, passing a little cigarette. My aunt was supporting herself against a grandfather clock, and her own necklace swung in time with the pendulum. “Ruth, I’m off,” I told her.

  “What, now?”

  “It’s the actor.”

  “Yes? What?” she asked, then let my words penetrate the drink in her mind. She frowned. “You know he’s going to be very sad.”

  “I’m fine, I can handle him.”

  She leaned back, those great eyes blinking. “The soldiers are coming home.”

  “Yes, yes—”

  “My dear girl,” she said, raising her eyebrows and cocking her head, “Nathan is coming home.”

  HE WAS THERE, under the arch: a ragged version of the young man I’d seen there only nights before. Those eyes had seen no sleep, and his young cheeks had not seen a razor; still, Leo, always an actor, stood confidently under the arch, hands in his pockets as he looked around the park. A faint mist haloed the lights behind him. From all around came sounds of merriment, and rifles going off, and from somewhere invisible a band played marches, real or recorded, louder than was necessary. Looking at Leo under the arch, I thought perhaps he might be the only person in New York for whom the peace was misery.

  I walked into the light, he saw me instantly, and I assumed he would take one step back in bitterness, like a man in a duel. Of all mad things, however, he smiled.

  “Greta, you came.”

  I shrugged and pulled my shawl around me. “My aunt was throwing a party, the whole city’s gone mad.”

  “I know,” Leo said, raising an eyebrow. “My neighbors are throwing one plate after another against the wall.”

  I laughed. “It’s wonderful news.”

  “Yes,” he said, lowering his chin but keeping his gaze on me. “You knew it had to come.” I said nothing. He went on: “But we pretended it never would.”

  The smile was gone. He put his hands back in his pockets, lifted his chin, and regarded me. “Have you heard anything from him recently?” he asked at last.

  “A letter this week.”

  “So he’s all right?”

  I saw with a little horror what Leo was asking me. How selfish love is, though we never think of it that way. We think of ourselves as heroes, saving a great work of art from destruction, running into the flames, cutting it from its frame, rolling it up and fleeing through the smoke. We think we are large hearted. As if we were saving it for anyone but ourselves, and all the time we don’t care what burns down, as long as this is saved. The whole gallery can fall to ashes for all we care. That love must be rescued, beyond all reason, reveals the madness at the heart of it. Look at Leo, so kind and tenderhearted. Look at him. Forgive him for hoping my husband was dead.

  “No, he’s alive,” I said severely. “He’s coming home. Perhaps he’ll tend the wounded.”

  Nodding. “Of course. When do they come home, do you think? The soldiers?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  “I was asking around,” he said. A visible swallow in his throat. “I heard some will be back in a few weeks. And others, maybe Christmas, maybe January.”

  “It could be. I’m sure he’ll write me as soon as he knows.”

  “Of course.”

  There was a pause here, in which the whistling descent of a firework could be heard. As Leo turned to me, one could see how the mist had dampened his cheek. There was something angry in his eye. So dangerous, being with someone in love. Like standing beside a tiger.

  “What happens?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  A little flash of fury. “Your husband comes back, what happens? You said once you would always be able to see me. How can that be? Did you mean when he’s gone to work? Or on a trip? Is that what you meant?”

  “I . . . I suppose so, I don’t know what I meant.”

  “Your sweetheart,” he said, not bitterly but resigned. “What is wrong with your marriage that you’re here with me?”

  Because of Nathan, what he did. She is so lonely. “It’s an emotional night. I can’t tell you now.”

  Leo was not listening: “You don’t really love him, you can’t. The other night, I thought we had time, and maybe you might leave him. So I thought, The hell with it. I’ll just love her.”

  “That’s beautiful, Leo.”

  His head jerked up. “But you’re not going to leave him.”

  From somewhere, a group of men began to sing some old war song.

  “No, Leo,” I said. “I’m not going to leave him.”

  Who knows what is going on in the minds of others? We stood under the arch, a foot away from each other but as distant as if a national border lay between us. And he did not move, just stared at me, his eyes taking in each aspect of me, one by one, both hands and arms, every part of my face and hair. There was no part of me he was not seeing, now. I smiled, but he did not smile. Leo just stood there and took me in. Who knows what battle raged inside him? It went on, in outward silence, for only a few seconds, but I’m sure it was a long struggle as he inventoried the woman he loved, the bits of her he could not live without, the words she said, the promises and lies and truths,
the hope she gave him before one side won at last. He blinked three times and nodded.

  “Then good-bye,” he said and walked away into the trees.

  IT HADN’T SEEMED more than misty, but by the time I got home I found I was quite damp, and my black coat and absurd hat veil had become embellished with little diamonds. All around me the crowds were starting to gather, just as on Halloween, but this time in the ordinary costumes of their daily lives. Pretty girls were everywhere, perhaps under the mistaken impression that the soldiers would magically, instantly, be home, and old men had put on their military garb to stand and smoke pipes together on corners. I wanted to shout, “Don’t forget this! It’s going to happen again! You’re going to let it happen!” because of course they would, these young jubilant people; someday they would be the old soldiers on the corner, smoking pipes, approving of a new war. It would seem good, and just. Surely it would to me, as well. I couldn’t stop it, but I wanted them to remember this, the horror they were in for. Not to cheer it.

  And yet how could they not? How could I not be drawn into it myself? The girls on the streets, their dresses dampened but not their spirits, standing with bottles of whiskey to hand out to passersby who swigged as if there was no flu epidemic, the ragged young boys running everywhere, unsure of what it was all about, waiting on corners with their hats out for a penny—our future soldiers—and drunks of all varieties, top hat and beat-up derby, singing songs I did not know, and leaning on every railing and lamppost in a toppling world, and then, fireworks! They spiraled sparks and made more noise than light, hissing glimmering above the village, and what vicious Cassandra could shout there was another coming? Who would even dare? Perhaps they knew. There is always another coming, as there was even now, buried in the dirt by my foot, the seed of the oak that would crack the sidewalk in two. I’m sure in my own age, when the cure came, some wicked prophetess would stand there as we cheered in the streets to shout, “You fools! Another’s coming! You won’t remember!” But she would be wrong. Humans remember all too well; we are made this way, and suffer for it. It is the art of living, in drink and dance and love, to forget. So let them, Greta. It was their war, not yours.

  It had shocked me, what Leo did. To disappear so quickly into the black, dripping trees. But surely I had really come in at the end of a conversation, a long one he had been having with me all night—without my being there—in which he went over everything I’d said as if it were brand-new, perhaps gave speeches in his cramped room, ones where he persuaded me to leave Nathan, ones where he set up the rules to our affair once my husband returned, ones pleading and angry and forgiving. I’m sure Leo tried every delivery of those words. He was an actor, after all. And so, when he saw me, he had already gone through every possible conversation. I’m sure he didn’t know it himself, but he was only waiting for one answer. And I gave it. And he saw there was no need for pleas or speeches—he had already given them, in every intonation—for they would change nothing. So Leo said good-bye, the only thing he had not practiced saying.

  Well, that is that, I thought. For the best, I suppose. And yet . . . I felt a pang of loneliness. Each Greta had found someone to comfort her. What would I go back to? The same solitude? The same months without touching another soul? The only promise I had, for these few travels, was what they had made for me: a husband to hold me at night. A lover to steal a kiss on an arch. That he was not really my husband, or really my lover who left me—did that matter in the end?

  I heard the party raging on at Ruth’s, but didn’t have the heart for it. I thought perhaps I’d lie down. It was wearying, getting everything wrong.

  I opened the front door, and there was Millie, her face blurred with tears over some private worry—a boy, of course—but I wasn’t up to finding out (probably the mistress never was) so asked her to make a pot of chamomile tea and I would get ready for bed. “You should take tomorrow off,” I told her. “It’s a holiday all round,” to which she replied thank you, ma’am, it was already her day off but wasn’t it grand indeed? To see the boys all coming home at last? Yes, I said, yes, stripping back down to my all-in-one with its absurd split drawers. The bed was miraculously warm—how had it been done?—and then I felt, at my feet, the hot water bottle Millie must have put there telepathically. Or, perhaps, routinely. It was delicious to have needs met I didn’t even know I had.

  The tea was set beside me and, beside it, two bland cookies that lingered in my mouth like sand. I flicked the gaslight and the room was violet except for my bed candle, panting like a pet. Out it went—and yet my thoughts had lit another candle in my brain. Felix was not my Felix here. And there was no Nathan. What comfort was there left? I am so lonely, I had told Ruth once. It seemed true in two worlds now. I felt sleep coming, the dead leaves of my thoughts gathering in piles behind my eyes, then—

  A loud knocking. I heard someone stumbling down the hall. From the window: the sound of armistice joy erupting everywhere. I grabbed a robe and wandered into the hall.

  In the open door to my apartment: Aunt Ruth. Shimmering in jet beads, and on her shoulder, a white parrot. Drunk as anything. Slurred speech and one sleepy eye:

  “He’s back. He won’t have anything but you. If I were young, I’d go with him this instant, and that’s what you’re going to do. I won’t have it any other way.” To the girl behind me: “Millie, don’t gossip.” To me: “Let us sport us while we may, am I right? Get dressed, go now. Go now before you get a chance to think.” And she staggered back downstairs, but not before the parrot chuckled twice, eyed me, and said: “Drink up! Drink up!” I heard the party roar outrageously as she reentered.

  There, under the streetlight, leaning with a bottle of wine against the brick: smiling Leo. Why smiling?

  The heart will hear only one sound. A “no” will pass unnoticed, and a “good-bye” will be heard only as a deferral of hope; the future is unmarred, pushed forward by events but untouched by them because the heart sees only a perfect future with its beloved, and hears only news about that future. The rest, as they say, is noise. There is only one sound it can hear. There is only “yes.”

  He raised the bottle in greeting, and shrugged his shoulders as if to say: What did you expect? The prisoner in the jail yelled out in favor of peace, and from one window came a snow of torn paper, which blew down our way and settled in his hair. Looking up at me, someone. You should have waited. You would have had her, the one who loves you. Tonight: She has Nathan, and you have me. I smiled at him from the doorway, remembering that in my world I was a single woman, and lonely. So be it.

  NOT HIS PLACE, but a friend’s place—a fellow named Rufus who we found at a bar—that would be empty for the night. I found I was quite drunk, but had more champagne when Rufus offered it. Then to the apartment. Up five flights of stairs, a confusing double lock that needed some pool-shark English and a nudge of the hip, and we were in, the light was on, and I began to laugh. How could I not? There, strung from every doorway and knob and cabinet pull was a web work of clothesline and, on it, surely every item Rufus owned hanging damp and drying. Long, absurd socks and sleeveless underthings, all the strange hidden men’s clothing of the early twentieth century, there to amuse me. Collars were pinned in a line, free of their shirts, and cuffs as well. Long woolen garments drooped like hanged men. “Oh Lord,” Leo sighed, and ducked under a clothesline, his head popping up behind it with a grimace. He offered me his hand and I ducked under as well, and we made our way to the middle of the room. “We have some time left. Let’s go away. My father has a farm up north, I’ll take you there, we could just cook and sleep and walk in the snow.” He offered me a last swig of champagne and I took it. This room was dark, but I looked around and saw how the streetlights shone through the handkerchiefs, illuminating them like Chinese lanterns. Hanging there, glowing all around us. Strange how briefly life is worth the pain. I kissed him there with the cloth lamps on their lines, not a room at all but a pleasure park at night, hung with moons. “Oh,” he said,
as my hands moved naturally, a lady of the twentieth century. “Oh, wait, oh no.” He struggled in my arms, then relented. I suppose it should have occurred to me that this was 1918, and he was still a virgin.

  NOVEMBER 14, 1941

  I AWOKE, A FEW DAYS LATER, WITH A SLEEPING NATHAN BESIDE me, his head as still and handsome as if carved from stone, and I lay there and watched him for a long, long time. Sleeping so peacefully beside me: a husband, a father. His face bristling with the day’s new beard, his nose imprinted from the glasses that lay on the nightstand, his lips parted slightly in a dream. Our heart is so elastic that it can contract to a pinpoint, allowing our hours of work and tedium, but expand almost infinitely—filling us like a balloon—for the single hour we wait for a lover to awaken.

  He did at last: I saw, in the dim light, his eyes shining as they gazed on me, his lips in a smile. “Do you feel . . . ?” he asked. I said I felt wonderful. “Could we . . . ?” he asked, pushing my gown up with one hand and spreading his fingers. I kissed him and smiled and said yes.

  And afterward, when he rose to go to the bathroom and I lay back in bed, prickling with pleasure, I thought of how I would awaken the next day in my world, six procedures complete. What waited for me there? No brother, no lover, no husband. I had not been able to fix that world, but I had been brought here, perhaps, to fix this one. Hearing the familiar sound of Nathan yawning and sighing from the other room. There was so little time. Already the Japanese were encoding messages, making plans, and I would lose him, too . . .